


You’re an Echo of a Sound I Can’t Get Back

by dilapidatedcorvid



Series: All of the Canyons in My Mind [2]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Background Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus, Character Study, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Implied Sexual Content, literary references up to the wazoo for the Sixth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26354662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilapidatedcorvid/pseuds/dilapidatedcorvid
Summary: In the middle of the night with no pretence of anonymity, no semblance of decorum to stand on, in a moment when neither is your forbearance brought to bear by her veneer of heartless indifference nor are her sharpened claws digging into your skin for the delight of tasting blood again, you have found rest and respite in each other.Perhaps it should be no surprise. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, after all.or, Camilla ruminates on mortality, mourning, and transience, and Corona breathes life into punctured lungs. It hurts, but at least this is a different, new kind of hurt.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Coronabeth Tridentarius
Series: All of the Canyons in My Mind [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915975
Comments: 6
Kudos: 26





	You’re an Echo of a Sound I Can’t Get Back

Dominicus lays in state in the empty chambers of your heart. Sometimes you wonder if it’s your body in the coffin instead. 

On nights when it is too hot for you to find the sweet respite of sleep and the dull ticking of the clock hanging precariously on a crooked nail in the wall whispers that it’s past three in the morning, you climb out of the cot that’s too small for you both and walk on the edges of your feet, padding silently to the door of the apartment.

You’re thirty floors up. The roof access is five more. The floor of the stairwell is always cold under your bare feet and pushing at the door to the outside lets out a dreadful creak that makes you wince, but it opens to the muggy evening air and the paltry wind that sweeps over the roof.

The roof is as dead as any other square of dirt on this planet, dry and devoid of life, but beyond the ledge, even at this hour, the city is alive. Orange dots flickering from windows decorate the horizon, a string of fairy lights strung across the bleak and barren landscape. Below, you can hear the sound of vehicles rumbling across the streets, the low drone of voices, the occasional pop of gunfire.

You approach the edge of the building and press the heels of your palms on the waist-high ledge. The edge is far enough you cannot see over it, so you push, lifting your soles onto the concrete, and you stand to your feet. The roof drops away and it’s an unimpeded fall to the pavement below.

Your stomach tightens, your lungs empty, your heart races, and it feels like being alive.

You will not fall. You have spent far too long at Swordsman’s Spire learning to dance along the edge of a blade to slip and plummet to your untimely death. But you have not made it this far by tempting fate; you crouch back down to sit on the ledge, your bare feet dangling into nothingness, chin tipped to the dark sky above.

The ledge is wide enough you can lay the length of your spine on it and your shoulder blades press into pebbled concrete. You close your eyes, easy as breathing. The air is like a wet blanket draped over your chest, tacky in your lungs. Your shirt sticks to your skin and you sweat in the creases of your elbows and along your upper lip.

It is too bright in the streets to see all the stars but the nearest of them twinkle from a hundred light-years away and you are witness to a majesty you cannot comprehend. Swirling stars sprawling out before your mortal eyes; you are just another body in a city bursting at the seams with them on a planet spiralling along in a system so insubstantial it might as well not exist in an utterly forgettable arm of a galaxy filled with tens of billions of others like it.

Here, you lie and sign yourself to lies. You have given your soul and have not even been spared your name. You are no one, a hooded figure with no face and no story worth remembering.

Here, if you laid still for long enough, the carrion birds that hop along the shade of the food stalls in the afternoon—scavengers seeking the smallest of dropped morsels—would feast heartily on your flesh, and the sand carried by the winds would work against your bones bleached white in the heartless sun until they too joined the dust dancing across dilapidated rooftops. Your name will erode off your gravestone and the uncaring universe will forget you as easily as it has forgotten every other damnable spirit that has passed through into the River.

Here, there is no God and you are the master of your fate, the captain of your soul.

Here, you are both ruined and made whole by your insignificance.

Here, you are nothing.

“ _Camilla.”_

You turn your head and are greeted by the sight of long blonde locks moving in the feeble breeze. You have woken your bedmate. She comes to sit beside you, a dream made of the sharp edges of broken glass and the burn of gold-gilded liquor in the back of your scream-raw throat, throwing her long legs over the ledge to join you in your vesper vigil. She does not admonish you for your escape and you don’t know whether what you feel is relief or resentment.

Silence fills the space between you and you will your eyes away from the way her golden skin glows in the night, reflecting the orange of the street lamps below. She is the blades of a thousand knives wrapped in burnished gold foil, a rose whose thorny stem demands you pay the price of admission to admire. Once, you told her of your rituals of restless rumination, of your contemplations of transience and mortality. It had earned you nothing more than a pitying look and you never spoke of it again.

When the plaintive silence no longer interests her, she sighs into the evening air. Someone will remember you, even in another time, she says artlessly, and you wonder what it must be like to be beheld and so beloved. She asks if you know it’s Sappho. If you know that, on the Third, the lyrics roll off their tongues in languidly lauding.

Of course you know. You think about the library in the satellite and the small book stored in vaults with other ones like it, decayed and deteriorated, falling apart at the spine, corners worn away from the oils of thousand years of flippant perusal. Fragments of a book of fragments of poetry.

You remember long fingers made of bone and cartilage and ligament carefully flipping through scans of the book. Gleaming grey eyes scouring the page, pen trapped between his teeth. His brow is creased in concentration, the young Warden-to-be exerting himself to commit yet another book to memory.

He looks to you, his cavalier, and as brief recess, he smiles and does as is common to him in these days: recites yet another length of poetry. I know history. There are many names in history but none of them are ours.

You shake your head and lift your eyes to meet his owlish ones, wide behind his plex-thick spectacles. They will remember us, you say, we won’t let them forget. He nods, promises to publish his paper and inscribe his name among the greats immortalized in the hallowed halls of the Sixth, and you swear, before your peers and your betters, to serve him to the end of entropy; one flesh, one end.

You don’t remember if his lips were actually chapped from the carefully filtered and circulated air in the library, or if it was ink from the last pen that met its end between his faintly-yellowed incisors that lined the creases of the rose-pink epithelium, or if it’s all a figment of your imagination. You cannot trust the fragments of your memories anymore.

Then you think about other fragments nestled in the bag under your pillow and you decide you no longer want to think.

She asks if you miss home and you cannot bring yourself to say that all that remains of your home is shards in a leather pouch, and that hers is built on a tower of lies, but learning to understand unspoken words comes with familiarity and you have spent too many hours together. Your silence is a mournful wail only the two of you can hear, atonal accompaniment in a dissonant symphony of discordance. At least she grants you the dignity of looking away from your traitorous face.

Instead, she tips her head towards the sky and stares at the faint light of Dominicus, gold winking weakly against the indigo sky. She reminisces in wonderous voice of balls at the spiralling palaces on Ida, lavish feasts that never seemed to end, decadent desserts dripping syrup that clung sweetly to her lips even the morning after. As if either of you could ever forget she is royalty on a planet worlds away whose name brings no goodwill here.

Though you speak none of this aloud, you think of drawing lots for sugar and tasteless nutrient cubes popped in small, hungry mouths after the Third circle exams when he was made of eyebags and elation and you basked in the glow of his grin. Your sword was too long for you then, and so were his limbs for his robes, and the two of you were made of deviousness and daring.

You both long for a home you cannot return to.

In the middle of the night with no pretence of anonymity, no semblance of decorum to stand on, in a moment when neither is your forbearance brought to bear by her veneer of heartless indifference nor are her sharpened claws digging into your skin for the delight of tasting blood again, you have found rest and respite in each other.

Perhaps it should be no surprise. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, after all.

She curls her little finger over yours, and you feel as if you’re in free fall. You are weightless, your limbs akimbo in the slow drift of inevitability, sure as gravity. She is glass in your sheets, she is the kind of greasy meat they sell in the markets that makes you feel sick when you’re done, she is the wine that teases at your threads until you have unwoven yourself into tatters. Her kiss tastes like sand and grit and frankincense, and the canines in your lip beseech you kneel and pay your final respects to who you once were. 

You are drowning in your baptism into new life, gasping with waterlogged lungs when you breach the surface of your desires, and purpose is found in sandpaper sheets and the hollow of her throat where she tastes of sweat and dust and comfort.

It is the kind of love that has missed your heart and pierced your lung instead, and your breaths come out bloody and wet, a painful reminder of how alive you are. It’s not what either of you want. It’s not what either of you deserve.

It’s what both of you need.

Together, you lay on the edge of the roof, fingers brushing, your feet swinging to the beat of a funeral dirge. She tethers you to the hot summer air and the bumpy concrete under your thighs, prickling. When you sit up, you will find the pattern imprinted into your flesh, a temporary tattoo of your time here, and soon, that too shall pass. Humidity sticks to your skin like an unwanted embrace and the sounds of the evening are the sorrowful score to your tragedy of a play.

Below, the din of the evening continues on and the cars roll along the streets, a procession for the dead on a roof thirty-five stories high in the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Because apparently Tired Mind wasn't enough for me to say all the sad things I wanted to say. There are five intentional literary references in this fic. Did you catch them all? My greatest thanks to [@searchforthescars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchforthescars) who was so incredibly gracious with her time to beta this for me, and to Locked Tomb; no others I'd rather have CamCor feels with.
> 
> Liked it enough to get to the end notes? Drop me a kudos and maybe a comment if you're feeling saucy and so inclined!
> 
> Title from "No Maps of the Past" by The Collection
> 
> Tumblr: [frumpkinspocketdimension](https://frumpkinspocketdimension.tumblr.com)  
> Discord: SweetBabyRae#0967


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